I've had a rough...

Week. You know the ones…where absolutely everything that could possibly go wrong—both the things you could’ve foreseen and the things you couldn’t—does in fact go wrong, and sets into a chain of events that affects the rest of the week.

It starts with exhaustion, grossly unimaginable exhaustion to be precise. A lot of times this starts with a few missed hours of sleep combined with the physical exertion of work. I’m a workin’ boy, and I work hard. When I have the opportunity to attempt to break my body, I am for some reason driven toward the opportunity because I am and always have been curious about the amount of wear and tear the body can actually take. I used to be a wrestler, and over the course of wrestling practices where you lose pounds of water weight while doing an anaerobic activity that requires you to have most of your muscles flexed most of the time for a sustained time you learn that the body can take abuses that you could not have imagined. There are very distinct memories lurking in the back of my head about lying on the wrestling mat after practice and very literally not being able to move for about twenty minutes before dragging myself to the shower. Our physical forms can take beatings that we could not have imagined.

After the exhaustion comes the act. There is always one specific act that lets us know, in no uncertain terms, that we have moved into a subconscious locomotion through the day. In a lot of ways it’s a safety net. I used to call it survival mode: When you have been so broke you don’t know where the food is going to come from, you learn a certain way to survive that you can drop into whenever things look bleak, when you have been so broken that you wonder how much more you can take you can enter into it, and when you have been too tired to control your own life you can let the subconscious take over. But the problem with the subconscious is, of course, hubris. The part of us that is concerned only with us is consequently unconcerned with anything else. We think we’ve got everything figured out, something happens that reminds us we are human, and we glance back over our shoulder to make sure survival mode is behind us if we fall. At that moment, when you are looking to see the safety, you are simultaneously expecting to fall into it. It’s like you take a hit, and then, for human nature fight or flight reasons, the next time something even looks like it’s about to fall on you, you retreat. You’ve been here before. You’ve taken a hit like that. You know how bad it hurts. And you run to survive. There is nothing dishonest or weak in the act, it is human nature to ensure that the self will, at the very least, come through this thing on the other end in tact—physically at any rate—and there is not a whole helluva lot anybody can do about it.

After the catalytic act, comes the domino effect. A series of events start into motion that bob and weave and elevate and plummet and terminate somewhere unsettlingly out of sight. For some reason I am imagining a man walking along a sidewalk, and off to his left, periodically, and off to his right, periodically, there is a single row of dominoes. He sees that these single lines of dominoes run off into the distance a ways and that they start making strange turns and contortions and he knows that at the end of some of these rows of dominoes terminate by sending the last domino flying onto an extremely sensitive weight sensitive trigger that destroys the world. Some of them don’t. Most of them don’t. But some of them do, and so our friend walks very gently.

And sometimes the breeze from the motion of his legs starts a series that he didn’t realize he had started until it’s too late.

The worst part about these particular series of events is that you wind up standing static on the path just watching and waiting for the destruction to come. This is an unusual turn of the screw in that survival in this situation is reliant on how still you can stand because if you take off running after the chain you’ve started, you’ll start others you won’t know about and then you’re truly up the proverbially creek in a state of paddlelessness. In a lot of ways it’s like the Taoist principle of non-action wherein the act is in not acting. Non-acting does not mean that you are not “doing” something. It means, rather, that you have made the decision to not act and are then acting on the decision. Choosing to wait it could be called. Wait it out. Be patient. A groan of tedium escapes me. It is an unflinching act of non-action.

Waiting takes it toll on us, then we take a breath that isn’t quite as terrified as the last one, and we start thinking we’re going to be okay. We start looking around at the other lines of dominoes and see that they are still standing. We glance to the long line of fallen dominoes and begin to think it reached its end and we made it through. We start to take tentative steps again. Gently, delicately, we move a leg and place it in the direction we were moving along the path. When nothing happens, we move the other leg. After a while we are walking again. It’s not a brisk walk yet, but our locomotion has become regular and our eyes are starting to not jump from side to side in fear and panic that we’ll have to stop again soon. We start to focus on the path again. We start watching where we’re walking more than we’re watching the wake of our walk. We’re only a little bit worse for the wear, and pretty soon we are walking at a descent rate with just enough focus on where we’re going and just enough focus on where we’ve been to keep progress moving.

This is where we want to be. When we start getting too hubristic, we start running and the potential for disaster increases. When we are not confident enough we move to slowly to get everything accomplished that we want to, and potential destinations of growth are not reached. Move and change and grow and develop at a steady rate. If you are moving too slowly, atrophy sets in and you will never be able to accomplish everything you are capable of accomplishing. If you move too fast, you outgrow the joints that connect you because there is too much stress and pressure put on them that they cannot handle (no matter how much abuse they can take)—we tend to decelerate as fast as we accelerate. For some reason Britney Spears and boy bands and one-hit wonders are coming to mind. To blow one’s load in a couple of years seems like a huge waste of our existence.

I guess my whole project, my oeuvre if you will, is a testament to the steady gait and faith in the long run. Very rarely do I see progress in a day. So I walk along, minimizing disaster and maximizing efficiency, balancing speed and accuracy, and staying out of survival mode as much as possible but being glad I know it’s there.